How Much Further Can Mueller Push Manafort?

If Robert Mueller puts any more pressure on Paul Manafort, he’s liable to turn Manafort into a tiny diamond. First of all, Mueller apparently has Rick Gates, Manafort’s old running buddy, singing the entire Ring cycle as regards to the relationship he and Manafort—and the Trump campaign—had with a whole host of the Volga Bagmen. From CNN:

That Gates and the unnamed person, who had lived in Kiev and Moscow and worked for one of Paul Manafort's companies, were in touch in September and October 2016 was "pertinent to the investigation," a court filing from prosecutors said Tuesday night. The acknowledgment that Gates knew the person had Russian intelligence ties is alleged in a report prosecutors filed about the coming sentencing of a Dutch attorney. That attorney, Alex van der Zwaan, who worked with Gates and Manafort previously, pleaded guilty last month to lying to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators about his interactions with Gates and the unnamed person.

Manafort has to know that Gates is the golden key that will open the door to Manafort’s own cell. Certainly, as Politicopoints out, the folks at Camp Runamuck know it.

While Gates now wears a GPS monitor around his ankle, in 2016 he wore a Secret Service lapel pin that gave him easy access to Trump on the campaign trail and at Trump Tower. “He saw everything,” said a Republican consultant who worked with Gates during the campaign. The consultant called Gates one of the “top five” insiders whom Mueller could have tapped as a cooperative government witness. One defense attorney in the case said Gates’ plea has triggered palpable alarm in Trump world.

Manafort may have struck a larger public profile, but Gates spent more time in Trump’s orbit. Manafort left the Trump campaign under a cloud of scandal in mid-August 2016. Gates, his right-hand man, stayed on through the election before assisting the Trump inauguration and Trump’s early presidency. Worst of all for the White House, Gates lacks hard-wired loyalty. He is not family, like Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., or his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nor is he among true Trump believers like Corey Lewandowski and Brad Parscale.

Through Gates, Mueller gets Manafort, and Manafort is the whole ballgame, at least on the issue of the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 election. (As far as money-laundering, real estate scams, and the rest of the bag of White House horrors, there will be other songbirds singing other songs, I reckon.)

Rick Gates

Getty Images

Manafort’s own camp seems to be playing that card pretty heavily, too, at least according to CBS News. There is no way to interpret this latest story as anything less than a shot across the president*’s ample beam. “Nice little hidden criminal past you have there, Mr. President. Be a shame if anything happened to it.”

According to the sources, Manafort is not planning to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and will fight the charges through to trial. It is unlikely that Manafort will escape conviction now that his co-defendant Richard Gates has agreed to work with the special counsel and the charges against him are no longer focused on rarely-prosecuted legal infractions involving the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Manafort was originally charged with money laundering and making false statements to investigators. Last month, after Gates pleaded guilty to two counts,

“Reasonable” is a very flexible term in this context—in which it apparently means that it is reasonable to expect that an amoral gombeen will behave pretty much as you’d expect an amoral gombeen to behave if the country elected an amoral gombeen to be President of the United States. The outward-bound ratlines are getting jammed up.

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